Supporting reliable and secure transport services over DVB-RCS satellite systems using XCP

The DVB-RCS standard provides a framework for Multi-Frequency TDMA (MF-TDMA) and dynamic resource (frequencies and time slots) allocation over satellite links. Nevertheless, MF-TDMA and dynamic resource allocation alone are not sufficient to achieve satisfactory throughput for TCP, the dominant transport protocol in IP-based networks such as the Global Information Grid (GIG) system, due to the inherent large delay-bandwidth product of the satellite links. Various mechanisms called TCP Performance Enhancement Proxies (PEP) are proposed to improve the performance of TCP over large delay-bandwidth product networks. However, typical TCP PEPs do not support GIGpsilas layer-3 security standard HAIPE (High Assurance Internet Protocol Encryption). In this paper, we identify eXplicit Control Protocol (XCP) as a desired performance enhancement mechanism, and propose a novel system architecture that integrates DVB-RCS, XCP and HAIPE. We implement XCP in the network simulator QualNet and evaluate its performance against that of TCP. Our simulation results show that XCP achieves higher throughput and fairer bandwidth allocation among competing traffic flows in DVB-RCS systems than TCP.